S-STEM Scholar Kassandra Barrera's Blog

As we are getting near the end of the semester, there is a lot of conferences for my team and me. This week our main focus is the ASU SOLS conference which will be on March 28, 2019. We will be bringing along the new members David and Roberto so they will get to see how these conferences will be because they are going to take a huge role in this project in the Fall of 2019. Giving them this experience now will really help them because it will allow them to see what it will be like when they take lead in presenting in conferences like these.  I am excited about this because it will be the first one we do this semester so it will really help all of us get our feet wet again.

The team and I decided to meet up on Friday and go over a few things all together. We came in and collected the last of our samples Day 28 of our media. We also retreated more plastic disks to start longer trials in the future. However, FTIR is our main focus right now, so since I have that OChem behind my back I have been trying to help everyone as much as I can. I did a bunch of research on the ingredients that are used in our media. I did this because we have been getting some unknown readings in our FTIR graphs and we might think the media could be a factor. Our main focus this week is getting our poster updated with new FTIR images to present at the symposium at ASU Tempe. On Thursday, we will be meeting with Dana and I will show her my findings and see what she might think it means.

So this week we made sure that all of our analyzed FTIR information is organized in our drives, which I will share more conclusive what we found more later on. Our team is trying to apply for an ASU symposium at Tempe and we had to work on our abstract and update it with more accurate information since we listed future studies and now we already have started those "future studies so they are not really considered in the future since we have already started and do have preliminary data and we can talk about it. So our abstract has changed quite a bit after modifying it. Also, since we have new people added to our team we showed David how to alcohol treat and dry these disks under the hood. We believe that since we go in and out a lot out of these plates, there might be some contamination so we decided to retreat them with alcohol and use this time to show some of the new additions how this procedure was done. This was done on 2/22/19 and before the plastics were treated, I put e